New Accessibility Edition and More

By Gerd Waloszek, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – March 9, 2012

Gerd WaloszekIn April 2012, the SAP Design Guild Website will celebrate already its 12th anniversary – which is quite an achievement in the Internet age. Just before this date, actually today, we published a new accessibility edition, the third one on this topic and the 12th altogether during the site's lifetime. We announced this edition back in our November newsletter, but as it so often happens in life, it took a little bit longer until we were finally ready to present the results to the public.

The new edition is an update to our second accessibility edition, which was published in 2005 as our ninth edition. Seven years later, many things have changed in the accessibility field and at SAP as well, and an update of the edition was definitely overdue. On the other hand, there is only some, but not too much overlap between the topics covered in the two editions. The new accessibility edition has two focus points: (1) SAP's activities in the accessibility field, and (2) technical aspects of accessible applications. The edition also includes updated reference materials. As always, we hope that you will find the articles in the edition both useful and interesting.

Curb cut

Figure 1: Curb cut – the lead image for the new accessibility edition (the photo was taken in London, UK, by the author)

Having just published the accessibility edition, we are already thinking about the next edition. We already have a proposal for a potential topic, but so far it is too early to make any commitments.

In this editorial, I would also like to provide a brief overview of SAP's sponsoring activities in the UI design field this year. In February, SAP sponsored the Interaction 2012 conference in Dublin, Ireland (recruiting level). I was able to attend the conference and plan to publish a conference report – hopefully before everyone has forgotten that there was an Interaction 2012 conference at all...

In early May 2012, SAP User Experience (UX) will sponsor the CHI 2012 conference to be held in Austin, Texas (Champion sponsor) and have a recruiting booth there. We will inform our readers about SAP UX activities at the conference as soon as there is more information available. SAP will also sponsor the HCIL symposium at the University of Maryland at the end of May, 2012, which will already be the 29th(!) of its kind. And in early June, SAP UX will sponsor the UPA International Conference 2012 (Platinum sponsor), which will be held in Henderson, Nevada. More sponsoring activities are on the SAP UX agenda, and we will disclose further details as soon as possible.

At the Interaction 2012 conference      CCD and Samuel Beckett bridge in Dublin, Ireland

Figures 2-3: Impressions from the Interaction 2012 conference in Dublin, Ireland (photos by the author)

Now for a few technical notes. In February, we transferred the SAP Design Guild Website to a new server. We also applied some internal structural changes to the Goodies section, which caused some URLs to change. We hope that the site's operation was not affected too much by these activities (I know of one visitor who copied a page URL the day before the changes happened and could not find the page the next day – my apologies once again). As a consequence of the transfer activities, it is now possible to also access the site using the shortcut URL "sapdesignguild.org".

Dan Rosenberg

Figure 4: Dan Rosenberg (from "Dan Rosenberg on Design")

Finally, I have one more exciting piece of news to reveal: In January, we co-published an interview with Dan Rosenberg, entitled Dan Rosenberg on Design, which was originally published in SAP Info. SAP Info plans to publish further articles on design in the course of this year, and we will co-publish these articles as well. This series of articles will provide our readers with first-hand design information from professionals inside and outside of SAP.

We hope that you will remain loyal visitors to the SAP Design Guild Website in 2012 as well, and please spread the word.

 

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